The following documents and standards descriptions are hereby incorporated into the present disclosure as if fully set forth herein: i) 3GPP Technical Specification No. 36.211, version 8.5.0, “E-UTRA, Physical Channels And Modulation”, December 2008 (hereinafter “REF1”); ii) 3GPP Technical Specification No. 36.212, version 8.5.0, “E-UTRA, Multiplexing And Channel coding”, December 2008 (hereinafter “REF2”); iii) 3GPP Technical Specification No. 36.213, version 8.5.0, “E-UTRA, Physical Layer Procedures”, December 2008 (hereinafter “REF3”); iv) U.S. Provisional Patent No. 61/206,455, filed Jan. 30, 2009, and entitled “Uplink Data And Control Signal Transmission In MIMO Wireless Systems” and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/641,951, filed on Dec. 18, 2009, and entitled “System And Method For Uplink Data And Control Signal Transmission In MIMO Wireless Systems” (hereinafter “REF4”); 3GPP Technical Specification No. 36.814, “Further Advancements For E-UTRA Physical Layer Aspects” (hereinafter “REF5”); 3GPP RAN1 #61 Chairman's notes (hereinafter “REF6”); 3GPP RAN1 #61bis Chairman's notes (hereinafter “REF7”); and 3GPP TDOC R1-104971 (hereinafter “REF8”).
Multiplexing of control and data signals are discussed in Release 8 (Rel-8) of the 3GPP Standard in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) references REF1, REF2 and REF3 above. For example, data and control multiplexing may be achieved in the single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) uplink transmission from a mobile station to a base station. The base station de-multiplexes the data and control information to determine the characteristics of the channel from the mobile station to the base station. In the 3GPP LTE standard, the uplink transmission includes only one layer.
However, in Release 10 of the Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) standard, which is a candidate 4G system to be incorporated in the 3GPP LTE standard, uplink multiple-input multiple-output (UL MIMO) spatial multiplexing (SM) is introduced, which allows multiple codewords to be split across multiple layers.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for improved apparatuses and methods for multiplexing of control and data in the uplink from a mobile station to a base station in a MIMO system.